An old Rite

Literature.  Books.  Novels.  That with no pictures and turns of phrases that would confuse a lesser man.  Is there anything nobler than picking up a worn out paperback book and just throwing it into a heaping blaze of fire because you don’t agree with its contents and ideas?  I’d like to think there isn’t.  Burning a book is a rite of human expression that leads to the even older rite of seamlessly transitioning into a brutal dictatorship.  It’s almost uncanny how each act leads into another so perfectly.  With the advent of technology, books made of paper and firmer papers are becoming a thing of the past.  What will we burn now to signify that we are tired of acting like fully formed adults?  Setting a kindle or Ipad or whatever on fire doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi, not to mention all the baby photos of young Jeffrey that have not been backed up.  If you burn the technology you lose young Jeffrey’s first steps and we haven’t the time to remember what those look like.  Also an electronic book reader makes the book burning process less personal and so much colder.  With an old fashioned book burning, you don’t pick the book, the book picks you.  It lays on the bookshelf with an author’s name that threatens your shitty way of life.  Look at it, sitting there, prancing around with its well thought out ideas and complex themes, mocking your lame way of life.  The book is calling out to you in that Dirty Harry way.  So pick it up and bring it to the bonfire with the rest of the freaks and let history take its course.  A fond memory this will be indeed when your family is starving and half-dead under the new regime.  But at least you got to burn that book so I guess it all evens out.

 

This majestic dance of hatred will be lost with the advent of the electronic book reader.  One crazy burning a thousand works of art?  Sounds like deviant behavior to me buddy.  Why don’t you take a stroll over to the nice man in the full leather outfit and the shiny boots?  He’ll help you out.  Such sacred acts of hate are being lost, but fear not because when there is a will to destroy intellect and great ideas there is a way.  I’m pretty positive that we’ll have new and better ways to get rid of that which we deem subversive and troublesome.  Never doubt the human race’s capability for unwarranted and senseless destruction.  As a side note, don’t doubt the human race’s capability for warranted and sensible destruction, or buddy will you have some egg on your face.  So fret not, our traditions of hate and intolerance will never cease, they will merely evolve as the times change.  Well that’s all for me at the moment as I have a date with a nice hardcover that proposes a guide to destroying our most sacred of holidays through a most foul grinchitude and I shan’t be late or I’ll be arrested.  Tough but fair.